The General Workers’ Union has commissioned a report on precarious employment that will be concluded this month.

The report, compiled by people outside the union, would be presented to the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development, which would then make recommendations to the Government, GWU general secretary Tony Zarb said yesterday.

Mr Zarb was speaking at a conference on precarious employment in the security industry.

He noted the union was the first organisation that spoke out about precarious employment and he expressed satisfaction that the Government understood the situation.

GWU services section secretary Cory Greenland said the union had received positive feedback after it made a number of statements about precarious employment, at times naming and shaming companies.

He said some companies had approached the union and others did not.

By the end of last year, the union had signed collective agreements with three security companies employing a total of 800 people and is at the moment having talks with another three.

If an agreement was reached, 1,200 out of the 1,800 security workers on the island would be covered by a collective agreement.

Mr Greenland said abuse included using part-timers to save on national insurance and benefits; placing workers on three or six-month definite contracts; making workers pay for training and uniforms and forcing them to work their break without pay.

He noted that a security guard cost an employer €5.66 an hour according to the union’s calculations, so he could not understand how a number of security companies were offering bids for a security service at a rate lower than what it cost them.

The Malta Employers’ Association insisted in a later statement that it would not accept any definition of precarious employment that was not recognised internationally.

It said it would not be drawn into talks about labour market issues that were not measured or properly defined. While condemning abuse at the workplace, the MEA reiterated that a number of practices being labelled as precarious by “some unions” were illegal practices.

These could be stopped through better law enforcement, self-regulation and ethical public procurement processes that allowed tendering companies able to offer decent conditions of employment to their employees.

It added that it would be foolish and counterproductive to consider introducing further legislation when the legal infrastructure to curb such irregularities already existed.­­­

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.